Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Whose children are these?

Children
live in their own fancy world and dream up their own realities around the world
they live in. Many a times, this world is punctured by adults with their
desires which are very jarring for the child. In India, the girl child is
attacked from even before she is born to the entire period of her life, in many
ways, physical or psychological. While we acknowledge, and have laws to
protect, the girl child/adult, many a time, these laws are there in paper and
never followed up with action.

One
of the heinous crimes against children is Child Sexual Abuse. This crime
always, almost takes place within families, among friends of the family, people
who the child trusts as does the family.

In
a story told by a 78 year old lady from an elite background in Bengal, she
recalled how, when she was a little girl, their home was frequently visited by
her maternal uncle who lived in a town near Kolkata. During this visit, he
molested and performed odd acts of sexual nature, forcing himself on the lady,
then only a child and made her do things to him, which her child mind could not
comprehend but was hugely disturbed to participate in. She did not have words
for it at that time, however, at a later stage; she did open her mouth and tell
her mother. Her mother refused to believe her and confronted her brother,
whereupon, he denied it completely. The matter was put away, as if the lady had
lied. When, in later years, she was found to resist her husband’s approaches,
which lead him to leave the marriage, and she develop cancer of the uterus, out
of the enormous amount of unresolved negative emotions she harboured around
sex, it is only as a cancer survivor, speaking up her truth as a means to come
to terms with the happenings of her childhood, and rid herself of the guilt and
shame she suffered all her life, for no fault of hers, did she find listeners,
who were a family of cancer survivors, quite far from her own.

This
story is only one among dozens of cases of Child Sexual Abuse that happen on a
daily basis, across all sections of society in India. The crime, least
acknowledged as one, inside the family is quickly hidden away or covered up. At
best the abuser is asked not to visit any more. But what if the abuser is the
own father? Where can we send this person? Our imagination may not want to
accept this reality, but the fact is, this too is a glaring fact in India and
elsewhere in the world.

The
abuser never admits to the crime. Nobody goes to law for this. There are as
little cases in the Police Stations in India on this issue – who will go? What
will happen to the name of the family? What will the family do, if the abuser
is the bread winner in the family?

We need laws to protect children, from heinous crimes of this nature, if not in
their homes, then it becomes a moral responsibility of schools they go to, to
keep a strong eye watching out for children who might be showing signs of
stress. Teachers, adults at home and in places where the child visits, like
Tuition Classes and wherever, have to be sensitized. Not only that, stricter
rules must come in place and where the Public Legal System have to be empowered
to visit dysfunctional homes or schools where any child suspected to be
violated sexually must be contacted and parents brought under stricter
vigilance and punishment. Since Child Sexual Abuse, more than often, happens in
the family, there must be means and ways to intervene, even within the family,
for this is true, that the family hides the truth.

Older
than perhaps the institution of prostitution, Child Sexual Abuse is not a
problem that has come up now, or affects only the rich or the people living in
the Metros, it is as old as human interaction between a child and pathological
adults are concerned.

What
are we as a government or law makers doing about it? Why must we as a society
take so little cognition of this crime or hide it or just go about saying that
it probably is a story told by a child from her own dream world?

If
you are someone who has gone through CSA or know of someone who is undergoing
one, it is time to raise alarm. You can reach out to # 100 anywhere in India;
you do not need the family’s permission to do that.

The question I am leaving you with is: Why must we have so much
respect for this institution called family, when, it is unable to protect
children?